Bonehedz back in action for Town Party concert on Greenwich Ave

Nearly 30 years after their hey day in local bars and clubs, the Bonehedz are back to play the Greenwich Town Party Saturday.

Nearly 30 years after their hey day in local bars and clubs, the Bonehedz are back to play the Greenwich Town Party Saturday.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Photo: Contributed Photo

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Nearly 30 years after their hey day in local bars and clubs, the Bonehedz are back to play the Greenwich Town Party Saturday.

Nearly 30 years after their hey day in local bars and clubs, the Bonehedz are back to play the Greenwich Town Party Saturday.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Bonehedz back in action for Town Party concert on Greenwich Ave

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

When Jackie Waring became engaged in 1989, she dragged her father to a concert in Port Chester, N.Y., to convince him to hire her favorite band for the wedding.

"He wouldn't believe me that the Bonehedz would be really good," she said. "But when he actually saw them, he was like, `Oh yeah, they were really good!' "

Some 150 people got up to dance at her rollicking wedding reception.

Twenty-four years later, when Waring learned that the Bonehedz will reunite at the Greenwich Town Party's auxiliary stage Saturday, she had another family member to confront: her 14-year-old son.

"I was like, `Do you have a baseball game that day?' " she said. "If so, I'm going to have to miss it."

Saturday evening, Waring will see the Bonehedz for what she guesses will be her 51st time. The band members -- Greenwich natives now scattered across the Northeast and beyond -- will return to their roots to headline the inaugural "GTP Rocks the Avenue" in the Board of Education parking lot. From noon to 6 p.m., the free event open to the public will feature six bands, an array of food and activities for children like face painting, magicians and photo booths.

Famous acts like James Taylor and Blues Traveler may grab headlines down at Roger Sherman Baldwin Park, where Greenwich staples like Local Talent and Billy and the Showmen will play a second stage. But for residents without tickets to the big show and for Bonehedz die-hards -- or "Bonehedz Heads" -- the excitement will peak just after 5 p.m. on Greenwich Avenue.

"It's not just a reunion," said 54-year-old keyboardist George Caravella, who lives in Bethel and works in the corporate relocation industry. "To see the Bonehedz on one venue and Billy and the Showmen on another is really part of the lineage of rock and roll in Greenwich."

From the mid 1980s to mid '90s, Caravella and his Bonehedz bandmates rocked venues across lower Fairfield County and Westchester County such as at Shenanigans in South Norwalk (today the Black Bear), Jimmy's Seaside Tavern and the Terrace Club in Stamford.

Shows featured danceable 1960s and '70s hits with lots of Motown and Beatles.

"We went almost to every place they played," said Libby Cooke, 53, who grew up best friends with Caravella's younger sister, Quinn, and began watching Bonehedz members perform in earlier band iterations back in grade school.

Becoming Bonehedz

The Bonehedz grew out of of youth bands that hailed from all corners of Greenwich. First, Mick Garaffa and Joe Cuzino, today 58 and 60, played in a high school band called Two Bit Friends. Caravella attended one of their shows alongside his then-seventh-grade classmates Mike Keegan and Eddie Skalandunas.

"That's where we were like, `Gee, we want to do what they do,' " Caravella said.

They did. Some 15 years later, the five of them merged with a couple of others to create the new group. They settled on several principles: They wouldn't try to be famous and they wouldn't try to nail a record deal. In fact, it was something of a diversion: They all had full-time jobs, several were married and a few even had kids.

For a while, they couldn't agree on a name. But when someone forgot to bring a guitar to a rehearsal, Mick Garaffa snapped.

"I was like, `You guys are just a bunch of boneheads!' " he recalled. "Then George looked at me and said: `That's it!' "

We're Boneheads!'

Shortly thereafter, a promoter from Jimmy's Seaside misspelled the band's name in a newspaper blurb for an upcoming show. The band members considered the look of "Bonehedz" an improvement, so they adopted it.

It was around Halloween, then. At a local Hallmark store, Garaffa chanced upon hats that had giant bones sticking out of both sides of the head. He bought a bunch of them and quickly penned a theme song for the band, replacing the lyrics of the '60s hit "G-L-O-R-I-A" by the band Them with "B-O-N-E-H-E-D-Z."

"We showed up at the next gig at Jimmy's Seaside with the name, with the bones on our heads and with the new theme," Garaffa recalled. "That's where the tradition was born."

Back on stage

Save for a rushed appearance by several band members at the 30-year reunion of the Greenwich High Class of 1977, Saturday will mark the first Bonehedz show since their brief revival in 2003. It will culminate about four months of preparations.

Rehearsals started in mid-winter, when five of the seven band members -- one is living outside the country and won't be playing -- met at their friend Jeffrey Hahn's house in Armonk, N.Y. Hahn had recently renovated his garage into a studio. Garaffa brought a list of 35 songs and they dove right in. "We kind of smiled, looking around the room," he said. "It all felt good again."

For their second practice, they planned to use the Internet to call up lead singer Mike Keegan, who lives and works in Jackson Hole, Wyo. (His move West was one factor that led to the group dissolving in the mid-'90s.) But Keegan had secretly flown into town and was hiding in a loft above Hahn's garage, waiting for the Bonehedz to begin rehearsing.

"I popped out like a whack-a-mole," he said.

"He just came flying down the stairs and got on the mike," Garaffa said. "It was so perfectly silly that it made perfect sense. We just went full tilt at it as if there had been no time off."

The group's fourth rehearsal took place this past weekend. Keegan flew back east to Boston last Friday for his son's graduation at Boston College. He's planning to come down to Greenwich Thursday for a final rehearsal before Saturday's show.

Garaffa's only wish: that the band could perform for longer than 45 minutes Saturday. He thinks back to when the band was playing regularly, in the early 90s, and Joe Cuzino was approaching his 40th birthday.

"We called him 'Joe Pushin' 40,' " he said with a chuckle. "Well, Joe, you went from pushing 40 to 'Joe pushed 60!' It's going to be fun to see this bunch of old guys doing what we used to do"